Analysing Biographical Interviews: Welfare States, the Imperative to Work and Accounts of Redemptive Citizenship

The interview extract in this dataset is provided by Dr Helen Blakely from the Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research Data and Methods, Cardiff University. The data are taken from a multi-method study, which examined the lives of a group of welfare-reliant single mothers living in the upper reaches of the South Wales Valleys, as they participated in a community welfare project (Blakely, 2011). The research charted the everyday interactions of these women with the pervasive mechanisms of street-level welfare governance, examining welfare reform from its rhetorical imaginings in policy to the situated action and meaning-making found in one site of its practice. While the study adopted an ethnographic approach, ten biographical interviews were conducted with women participating in the community welfare project. The data provided here is an extract from one of these interviews. This exemplar demonstrates how we can understand interviews as the accomplishment of meaning-making through situated accounts, in which participants produce particular performances of self. The dataset will be of particular use to those with an interest in class and gender, as well as interview encounters in the context of a broader ethnographic study.